Flagship

Israel warns of Lebanon invasion

Israel’s military chief indicated Wednesday the army was preparing for a potential ground invasion into Lebanon, as thousands of troops gathered at the border. US President Joe Biden said an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah “was possible,” but US officials have privately admitted it already looks like one, Axios reported, suggesting that Biden’s power to stop the war in Gaza spreading have “reached its limit.” Israel is accelerating its military campaign in Lebanon with the stated goal of bringing back 60,000 Israelis displaced in the north, but a Bloomberg columnist argued that it can only be achieved if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adds “diplomacy to his arsenal in ways he has yet refused to do.”

OpenAI to become for-profit

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is planning to take equity in the company for the first time, in a major overhaul that would turn the artificial intelligence startup into a for-profit corporation, Reuters reported. The shakeup comes amid a string of high-profile exits: CTO Mira Murati, a central figure at OpenAI, announced her departure Wednesday. The restructure would mean that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board, a move aimed at attracting more investors. But it will also have “implications for how the company manages AI risks,” Reuters wrote. The nonprofit’s mission was to ensure AI safety, but the company has also been driven by money, The New York Times argued: “Two forces that are not always compatible.”

FBI probes VC firm over China ties

The FBI is investigating whether one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific venture capital firms shared sensitive tech startup data with China. Hone Capital — which has invested in US startups such as driverless carmaker Cruise — received at least $115 million of initial capital from a Chinese private equity group, The Financial Times reported, and former employees claimed in court filings that the group incentivized Hone to invest in “critical intellectual property.” US authorities have warned tech startups of adversaries like China using investments to access sensitive data. Due to rising geopolitical tensions, Silicon Valley has already begun decoupling from China, Foreign Policy wrote, after years of welcoming Chinese investment.

China stimulus moves could hit banks

The Chinese government’s stimulus measures to revive its stumbling economy will likely squeeze the country’s banks, analysts said. The central bank instructed lenders to reduce their mortgage rate on existing loans by 0.5 percentage points, a move that S&P Global analysts said could strain banks’ net interest margins — a key source of income and profitability gauge. “China’s banks may end up as unintended collateral damage” amid the slew of aggressive measures, the South China Morning Post wrote. Things have already been bad: Five of the country’s six biggest banks reported significant declines in their first-half results.

Record partisan split on election integrity

Some 43% of Americans are not confident their votes for president will be counted accurately, and there is a record partisan gap when it comes to trusting the process. A new Gallup poll showed that Democrats’ confidence in election integrity increased by eight points between 2020 and 2024, while Republicans’ fell by 16 points. This widening gap in perception is dangerous for democracy, a Brookings fellow said, because the two sides appear to be “speaking two languages”: For Democrats, protecting democracy means accepting the outcome of elections, while Republicans view it as stopping people from illegally voting, he said.

Indian EY exec death under investigation

The death of a 26-year-old Ernst & Young executive in India, reportedly from work exhaustion, adds to growing global concerns about poor work culture. Government officials investigating the incident said Wednesday that the EY office operated for years without a state permit regulating work hours. India has the highest weekly working hours in South Asia, but lowest per-capita GDP, driving nearly 90% of Indian employees to consider quitting their jobs, a 2023 survey showed. There has been increasing international scrutiny over employee wellbeing in high-pressure jobs: A junior banker at the Bank of America died in May, prompting JP Morgan to create a new global role that would help younger employees better manage their workload.

India’s successful tech diplomacy

India is succeeding at technology diplomacy due to the West’s perception that it is a “democratic alternative to communist China,” a foreign policy scholar argued. Technology was at the center of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent US visit, resulting in several joint initiatives in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and clean energy, C Raja Mohan noted in The Indian Express. “The geopolitics of the moment” are driving the deepening tech relationship between the US and India, he wrote: Washington is seeking capable partners as its rivalry with Beijing intensifies, and India is looking to dominate global supply chains. “The Indian ‘brain drain’ to the US from the late 1960s has now become a living technological bridge between the two nations,” Mohan wrote.

Doomed expedition explorer identified

The bones of a British Royal Navy officer from a doomed 1845 expedition into the Canadian Arctic were identified. James Fitzjames was captain of HMS Erebus, which along with HMS Terror went in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. But the ships became stuck in ice, and the crews’ attempts to flee ended in starvation and death. Inuit witnesses in the 1850s said they saw survivors resorting to cannibalism, accounts later confirmed by researchers. Fitzjames is only the second expedition member to be identified, using DNA from a surviving relative, although remains from several others have been found. His jawbone showed cut marks, suggesting his desperate men “strove to save themselves” by cannibalizing his body, one archeologist said.

Global warming puts skaters at risk

Lake ice quality is degrading as the world warms, putting hockey players, ice skaters, and ice truckers at risk, research suggested. There are two main kinds of freshwater ice: White ice, made opaque by the prevalence of air bubbles, and black ice, which is clear, dense, and able to bear greater loads. Safe skating requires four inches of black ice, but scientists found that unpredictable warmer winter weather is creating thinner layers of black ice and sometimes thicker layers of white ice. Cold countries such as Canada regularly see people drown from falling through ice, and the growth of white ice is also a problem for ecosystems because it blocks sunlight needed for photosynthesis in the water below.

The oldest cheese in the world

An analysis of mummified cheese dating back 3,600 years offers clues to how ancient peoples lived. Scientists studied samples of cheese found buried with three mummies in the Tarim Basin in northwest China, preserved by sealed coffins and dry conditions. A chemical analysis of DNA fragments indicated the cheese came from cow and goat milk and suggested the mixing of peoples from the Tarim Basin, the Xiaohe, and the Eurasian steppe, while its inclusion in the burials indicated it was of value. While the scientists said they may attempt to recreate the cheese, they didn’t taste the original. “I think people don’t want to try it because we see that it’s not that attractive,” one researcher told The New York Times.

September 26:

• A Hong Kong court sentences two Stand News editors found guilty of sedition.
• The Tokyo Game Show 2024 kicks off at the Makuhari Messe convention center.
• Christie’s opens its new Asia headquarters in Hong Kong.

The world’s first museum dedicated to AI-generated art will open in Los Angeles in 2025. Dataland is the vision of Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol, whose installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art mused on what machines might dream about after seeing 200 years of art in the museum’s collection. For his “living paintings,” he trained an AI model on half a billion nature images, sounds, and scents to create artworks that evoke rainforests or underwater coral. “When you enter this room, it is dreaming all the flowers in the world,” Anadol, who describes AI as a “co-being,” told the South China Morning Post of one work. “And you can really smell these AI dreams.”

• The data center boom is giving clean energy a jolt.
• The shifting foundations of Gulf-US ties.
• Joe Biden wanted an FDR-sized presidency. Kamala Harris is after something else.